FernFolio

Marjane Satrapi is a young girl when revolution comes to Iran in the late 1970s. Living with her parents in Tehran where she attends a private school and enjoys all the normal activities of children, she listens as her parents, both socialist intellectuals with communist leanings, discuss 2500 of tyranny and submission beginning with the Persian emperors and ending with the Shah, puppet to British and the Americans. She tries to reconcile her parents’ secularism with her own religious beliefs, having long talks with God, and struggles with the contradictions between her parents’ socialist values and their privileged life style.
When the demonstrations against the Shah begin, Marjane’s parents are actively involved, until the soldiers fire on the protesters and many are killed. The Shah’s departure into exile is greeted by celebration, and, Marjane observes that, for a time, there seems to be real hope of a freer and more just society. Friends of her parents who have long languished in prison as guests of the Shah, are freed and others return home from exile. But the new republic adopts fundamentalist Islamic values and begins to impose those values on the general public. Soon new waves of Marjane’s friends and family are going into exile, and soon the arrests of socialists and communists and others begin. Some of her parents’ friends imprisoned under the Shah are executed by the Islamic Republic.
At the birth of Islamic Revolution, in 1979, Marjane is ten year old. Her co-educational French school, labelled capitalist and decadent, is closed, and she and all Iranians girls and women are obliged to wear the veil and conform to a strict dress code in public or be accused of immorality. Simple entertainments such as playing cards, listening to music and having dances are forbidden, and yet continue behind locked doors and at the risk of imprisonment and worse.
Then Saddam Hussein’s Iraq declares war on Iran, and the Satrapis are plunged into a world of F-14s, bombing raids, food shortages, and scud missiles. Marjane learns of the use of religious fervour and of promises of paradise to those who die a martyr’s death to lure young boys into uniform, and watches as more of her young friends leave the country to escape conscription and others are slaughtered in the mine fields.
Educated by her parents to read broadly and think rationally, and taught by their example to speak her mind and stand up for her beliefs, Marjane fights oppression at every turn. She attends illegal parties, listens to banned music and reads banned books. She bucks the clothing code, and argues with her teachers. After she is expelled from one school for questioning her teacher’s actions, and narrowly avoids arrest by the Women’s Branch of the Guardians of the Revolution, Marjane’s parents become afraid for their daughter and reluctantly conclude that she will not be safe if she remains in Iran.
Persepolis is the first graphic novel I have read in which the text and the images are perfectly complementary and mutually enhancing. Satrapi deftly distils the complex and turbulent years of Iran from the late seventies to mid eighties into black and white illustrations and written words that are both stark and beautiful. Her Marjane is a warm, funny and insightful child who grows from the innocence of young childhood to the passion of adolescence. This book lives up to all of its media hype. Wonderful!
FernFolio Editor